Leslie Charteris - Vendetta for the Saint

There is no doubt that the Mafia is one of the principal causes of the misery weighing on the population in Sicily. Whenever there is an offense to the law, one hears repeated: “That is an affair of the Mafia.”

The Mafia is that mysterious feeling of fear which a man celebrated for crime and strength imparts to the weak. The mafioso can do what he likes because, out of fear, no one will denounce him. He carries forbidden weapons, incites to duels, stabs from behind, pretends to forgive offenses so as to settle them later. The first canon of the Mafia is personal vengeance.

We must note that there are families in which the traditions of the Mafia are passed on from father to son, as in the physical order congenital illnesses are inherited. Also, there are mafiosi in every walk of life, from the baron to the worker in the sulphur mines.

Luigi Berti

Prefect of Agrigento

1875

It was the pleasant pause after the antipasto when the healthy appetite, only slightly assuaged by the opening course, rests in happy anticipation of good things to come. The Rosa del Vesuvio was cool and light on Simon Templar’s tongue, and for a few rare minutes in his adventurous life he prepared to surrender to whatever gastronomic pleasures Naples might provide, and tried not to think of certain other distractions for which that city is also somewhat notorious. Somewhere behind him, in the cavernous depths of Le Arcate, the restaurant where he sat, a lobster was leaving the humble ranks of the Crustacea and being ushered into the realm of great art in the guise of Aragosta alla Vesuvio. This was a moment to be savored and treasured to the full.

Therefore the loud and angry voice which suddenly disturbed his peaceful mood was a gross and egregious intrusion.

“Go away!” it snarled. “I don’t know you!” Simon turned a little in his chair for better observation of the tableau, which he had quite disinterestedly noticed as it developed.

The source of the grating voice sat a couple of tables away, a man in at least his late fifties, whose paunchy build was well masked by some superb tailoring in pearl-gray raw silk. Under the coat was a shirt of the finest chambray, clinched at the throat with a hand-painted tie nailed by a diamond pin and at the wrists with cuff-links of ten-carat star sapphires. On one highly manicured finger he wore a massive gold ring, which served to frame a cabochon emerald the size of a pigeon’s egg. But in spite of all this expensive elegance, his face was completely nondescript, looking as if it had been roughly thrown together in clay by a rather unskillful sculptor as a base to model a proper portrait on. All its features were untidy except the lipless slit of the mouth and the sparse border of carefully barbered hair plastered down around the gleamingly bald dome.

His companion was perhaps twenty years younger and dressed at less than one-twentieth the cost, with broad shoulders and curly black hair and the looks of any untravelled spinster’s conception of a Venetian gondolier, somewhat gone to seed. Intellectually they seemed to have even less in common, for they had hardly exchanged half a dozen words while they were under Simon’s indifferent attention. They had finished their meal and were sipping coffee when the third of the dramatis personae had arrived.

This one was as obviously English as he was a gentleman. His flannel bags and Harris tweed jacket were of unmistakable origin, and the act of wearing them in Naples in mid-summer proved that their owner, conditioned by damper and chillier climes, stubbornly regarded them as the only correct holiday wear for any country. The cut and texture of the cloth, as well as the hand-rubbed glaze on the conservatively laced shoes, indicated a man of means and good taste within rigidly traditional limits. Yet this was the individual who had, apparently, committed the frightfully un-British solecism of annoying a total stranger.

He had been strolling past the terrace, gazing all around like any tourist, when he had had a delayed reaction, stopped, turned, stared, hesitated, and finally turned in to address the putty-faced plutocrat who had responded so uncivilly.

“But, Dino!” stammered the tourist, with acute embarrassment heightening the color of his naturally ruddy complexion. “I know it’s a long time ago, but don’t you remember me?”

“What is this Dino?” The answering growl had an American accent that was incurably Italian at the same time. “I don’t know no Dino. Don’t bother me.”

“I’m Jimmy Euston,” persisted the Englishman, struggling to hold on to his temper and his dignity. “Have you forgotten Palermo? The bank? And that scar on your chin—”

The seated man’s fingers moved involuntarily to an inconspicuous white cicatrice on the side of his jaw.

“You’re crazy with the heat,” he said. “Beat it, before I get mad!”

“Now look here, Dino—”

The response was no more than a flicker of a finger, a fractional movement of the head, but it brought the other man at the table smoothly to his feet. He grasped the Englishman by the arm, and what happened next would have been missed by any spectator but Simon.

Euston’s mouth opened soundlessly, and his red face became white. He bent forward, attacked by a sudden spasm. Simon, to whom such tactics were as familiar as elementary drill to a sergeant, recognized at once what had happened: under cover of the victim’s body and his own, the curly-haired one had delivered a short wicked jab to the solar plexus.

There was more to come. The goon’s arm drew back again, and the cheap striped suiting wrinkled over a bulge of powerful muscles. Once more the contraction came that would send the arm forward again with enough force to crack a rib.

Except that this time the conclusion failed to materialize. If a steel vise anchored to a stone pillar had suddenly appeared and clamped home around the elbow, the arm would have been no more firmly fixed. With shocked incredulity the goondolier turned and gaped at the browned fingers that locked casually on his arm and rendered it immobile. From there his gaze travelled up over the broad chest and sinewy neck to the intruder’s face, the tanned face of a buccaneer with blue eyes that laughed and yet were colder than an arctic sea.

“That’s very naughty,” Simon remarked.

If it had not been for the tenseness of imminent explosion, they would have made an almost comic trio, joined arm to arm like three convivial friends about to burst into song. But there was a far from convivial expression in the yellowed and bloodshot stare of the man whom Simon held, a darkening menace that brought a hopeful smile to Simon’s lips.

“Try it on me, chum,” he invited softly. “Try anything — and I promise you’ll wake up in hospital.”

“Basta!” grumbled the man who denied being Dino. “They must be from the same nut-house. Let’s get outa here.”

In an instant the threatened eruption was dissipated. Obediently the bodyguard released Euston, and turned to pull the table aside for his patron. Simon let him go, a trifle reluctantly, but reflecting that what might have been a delightful brawl would probably have been broken up by spoilsport policemen and very likely resulted in his Aragosta getting cold while they conducted the post-mortem.

A banknote fluttered down between the coffee cups, and the foppish slob turned his back and walked away, followed by his two-legged dog; and Simon shrugged and looked at Mr. Euston again. The elderly Englishman’s face was still blanched, and beaded with perspiration from the effects of the single cruel blow he had taken.